Day: November 15, 2010

“Alexander B. Murphy, professor of geography at the University of Oregon, chaired a national committee that looked at how his field could provide a roadmap to a variety of challenges facing the planet, including climate change. In this video, Murphy provides us with a brief overview of his committee’s report: “Understanding the Changing Planet.””

“Number of victims from the disaster has been dramatically increasing around the world. This
phenomenon causes a very high demand of emergency and temporary shelters on particular basis
including the need of permanent houses in resettlement programmes. Noticeably, those resettlement
programmes have shown the success and failure of their activities. For instance, plenty communities
have been forced by governments to abandon their lands to the new locations for safety purpose.
Inevitably, many suffered people have to stay in the provided areas because they have no place to go
(Gall, 2004). Furthermore, there are abundant cases in which people move back to their original land.
Certainly, those failures have shown from the total change of life patterns and styles which cause
people many difficulties (Dikmen, 2002). These results show the unsuccessful resettlement
programmes which require a better solution. According to the previous works, vulnerable hazard areas
have been rarely studied in term of people behaviours correlated between the spatial and social
aspects. Based on the resettlement paradigm, building a new settlement site better, safer and suitable
for suffered people from disaster, traditional lifestyle of people in communities has to be carefully
studied before setting a displacement or resettlement plan. Spatial analysis model with employing
several scenes of high-resolution images is an effective tool proposed in this study. The applications
of spatial analysis techniques in resettlement programmes are introduced to present a crucial
integration between human behaviours in hazard areas and the relevant factors. Prescriptive method is
employed to describe the current situations due to the advantage of this method in studying the
complexity of human behaviours. This study is an initial part of literature review associated with the
application of spatial analysis in resettlement programme. An expected outcome of this study is a
framework to develop a model for simulating the human interaction between the spatial and nonspatial
parameters. Apart from this study, the designed spatial and non-spatial database in geoinformatics
will be suggested to set some factor criteria in the next step of this study. Eventually, this
study will be beneficial to other case studies with the similar contexts.”

“This is the time, perhaps as never before, and never again, for a new ethic: to do for the oceans in the 21st century–through technologies, through new understanding, through new insights–what was done in the 20th century for aviation, for aerospace.

“Where does GIS come in to all of this? I’ll put it another way. Where doesn’t GIS come in to the understanding of the ocean? After all, marine ecosystems, just as those on the land, are geospatial, and therefore so are the solutions that we must craft as we go forward.”

–Dr. Sylvia Earle in her keynote address at the 1999 Esri User Conference

“Rural ethnic entrepreneurship is a major driving force for strong rural communities (Fairlie 2004; Grey and Collins-Williams 2006; Quadrini 1999; Robles and Cordero-Guzman 2007; Rochin, Saenz, Hampton and Calo 1998; Verdaguer and Vallas 2008; Zarrugh 2007). In this project, we used a mixed methods approach to better understand rural entrepreneurship and to examine experiences and social network structures associated with ethnic entrepreneurs. This report identifies factors leading to successful ethnic-owned businesses and contributes to an understanding of the social networks and local resources using a sociospatial, community-focused approach. The term sociospatial means the active consideration of space, place and social indicators in a holistic fashion (Steinberg and Steinberg 2009). We explore issues important to ethnic business owners, how they work to achieve success in rural environments, and strengths they bring to the larger community. The result is a model for effective engagement in community and economic development for non-majority and ethnic groups who may not be at the table.”